Disk drives are employed to store large amounts of information in bits encoded on tracks on the disk in a series of logical 1's and 0's. These logical 1's and 0's are represented in bit cells, which are areas of uniform size along the length of the tracks on the disk. It is desirable that the information bits be encoded on the disk as densely as practical so that a maximum amount of information may be stored.
Conventionally, logical 1's are recorded as transitions in magnetic flux on a magnetic disk for a given bit cell, and the absence of a transition indicates a logical 0. These transitions are created by switching the write current polarity through the write head. The density of the stored memory in a typical disk depends on how close the data can be written into disk. For an inductive head writer, the write current rise and fall times directly affect the density of a magnetic storage medium. The faster the write current rise and fall time, the faster the change of the magnetic flux, and consequently more bits per inch can be stored in the media.
Due to the inductive nature of a write circuit head and the output capacitances associated with the write circuitry, ringing effects occur in the write current signal which tend to delay the settling of the write current to its final DC value. These ringing effects adversely affect both transition placement and bit cell size concerns. One option when ringing effects are present is to simply wait for the write current to settle to its final DC value and then enable the next transition for encoding a bit. This option means that bit cell duration must be increased to allow time for the write current to settle. While the accuracy of transition placement within bit cells in such a system will not be negatively affected by the ringing of the write current, the density of bit encoding by the write circuit is poor in comparison to desired goals. Another option when ringing effects are present is to switch the write current before it has settled to its final value. This approach maintains acceptable encoding density but results in decreased placement accuracy of bit encoding and hinders subsequent recovery of data from the disk. More particularly, if the write current has not fully settled from a prior transition, switching for the next transition might commence at totally different, uncontrolled, current levels, which results in sporadic placement of transitions in bit cells. Therefore, both options entail undesirable performance trade-offs where ringing effects are present.
One known solution to the ringing problem has been to connect a damping resistor across the terminal of the write head. Unfortunately, since some of the write current is diverted through the damping resistor, write current through the head inductor is reduced which operates to slow down the rise and fall time of write current transitions. While resistive damping does reduce the ringing effects, the slower rise times may not be acceptable for high performance write circuits. What is needed is a damping architecture which does not adversely effect switching frequency.